Survey: Moms Tired of Working

LiveScience Staff

Date: 12 July 2007 Time: 10:45 AM ET

Working full-time is losing its appeal for American mothers.

In the past decade, the percentage of working mothers who say full-time work is ideal dropped from 32 to 21, according to a new survey by the Pew Research Center. Now, 60 percent of them say they'd rather work part-time, up from 48 percent in 1997.

Likewise, only 16 percent of stay-at-home moms say they'd prefer to work full-time. That's down from 24 percent a decade ago. Nearly half of at-home moms say not working at all is ideal, up from 39 percent in 1997.

Not surprisingly, 72 percent of fathers prefer working full-time.

Rating themselves on a scale of 1 to 10 on how well they've done at parenting, 43 percent of at-home moms said 9 or 10. Only 28 percent of full-time working moms rated themselves so highly.

Finally, 44 percent of at-home moms think it's bad for society to have so many mothers away at jobs, while just 34 percent of working moms think that.

The survey, conducted earlier this year and released today, involved 2,020 telephone interviews of U.S. adults.